Wireless communications are now ubiquitous in our society. It is not uncommon for adults and children alike to carry a mobile telephone everywhere they go. As the technology of mobile telephones has advanced, mobile telephones began to provide advanced features such as instant messaging, Internet access, email, and the like. Integrated mobile telephones with the capabilities of a personal digital assistant (PDA) are commonplace, taking full advantage of new generations of mobile telecommunications networks (presently 3G).
A result of increased usage of mobile telephones with rich information providing features, on networks that provide increased bandwidth, is that when a critical mass of users are located near each other such that they each are in communication with a mobile telecommunications network through a single (or a couple of) base station, the available bandwidth is quickly consumed and quality of service (i.e., available bandwidth per user) quickly deteriorates.
For example, there are often over 50,000 people present at individual sporting events, such as a baseball, football, or soccer game, held in an arena or stadium. At other outdoor events, such as an automobile race, golf tournament, or in an amusement park, 100,000 or more fans may attend on any given day. The result of this congestion of people in a localized area, each equipped with a mobile telephone providing Internet connectivity or other information access capabilities, is that if every user attempts to log on to the Internet and retrieve information from a web browser, then quality of service will deteriorate as there is only a fixed amount of bandwidth available for all users to share through any given base station. As quality of service goes down, user frustration levels go up.
Even assuming each mobile telephone may be capable of providing 3G bandwidth (approximately 144 Kbps-2 Mbps data peak throughput), there are inherent bandwidth limitations of each mobile telecommunications provider. That is, the connection between the Internet and the base station through which the users are connecting to the Internet (referred to as a trunk line) has a limited bandwidth. Suppose a given trunk line has a bandwidth of 1 Gbps (1 Gbps≈1,000 Mbps≈1,000,000 kbps). Providing full 3G bandwidth (2 Mbps) to each connected user would allow only 500 users to connect at a given time with full bandwidth via that trunk line. Thus, to accommodate additional users, when the bandwidth of the connection between the base station and the Internet is fully exhausted by users at maximum 3G bandwidth, the mobile telecommunications carrier may gradually reduce the bandwidth available to each user as new users connect to the Internet or some other information provider.
In the above example, if 1,000 users desire a data connection, each user might receive only 1 Mbps bandwidth. If 50,000 users desire a data connection at a given time, e.g., at a sporting event, then each user will receive only 20 kbps. This is roughly the equivalent of the capabilities of modems from the late 1980's, and hardly sufficient to browse Internet web pages where graphics and multimedia abound. In addition, a more likely outcome is not that users receive low bandwidths, but rather that users receive no bandwidth at all. Once a base station become saturated, users are likely to receive a “No Signal,” “Network Failure”, or “No GPRS” error message, or the like. In such a case, in addition to not being able to establish a data connection, users will also not be able to establish a voice connection to make a normal telephone call, which presents a potentially serious safety concern.
While a possible solution to this problem is for mobile telecommunications providers to upgrade their networks to provide increased bandwidth in trunk lines, this would necessarily result in the mobile telecommunications provider needing to upgrade other resources as well, such as routers, switches, and the like, in order to handle the increased bandwidth. This is presently prohibitively expensive.
In addition, 3G networks are not yet prevalent or widespread. 2G (GSM) and 2.5G (GPRS) networks are presently more common. Thus, the problem illustrated above is even greater for 2G and 2.5G networks, as bandwidths are even lower than bandwidths available in 3G networks. Users will experience more congestion, and are even more likely to become frustrated with their mobile telephone service providers.
Thus, it would be an advancement in the art to provide a mobile telecommunications information distribution system that can provide information to users on a mass scale using relatively limited bandwidth per user. It would be a further advancement in the art to provide a system that is easily scalable regardless of the number of connected users attempting to retrieve information regarding a particular topic.